Stains I have known.

Here are my top three stains I have known, recently updated.
1) The buttercup stains in between my toes, gained this weekend.
2) Lipstick the collar of my favourite summer shirt, placed their by A.
3) Burn marks on my boot-cut jeans from the time they accidentally got set on fire by a girl in Shoreditch, we ended up dating after that.

This weekend was troubling. I went down to Devon on Friday, turning down an offer to review a supper and cabaret place in the evening because I had to be in Devon for a memorial service (in hindsight I'm not sure I made the right choice - I could have gone with A).

The memorial service was strange, it was my father's side of the family, who I barely know. It was held at the tiny church near the old stately home my grandparents (whose passage we were marking) had owned. It was very country and very English, the vicar was tall, balding and awfully polite. The whole scene (apart from the cars) could have been from any age between the 1920 and the present day. Tweed is timeless. I met some real characters, the woman that seduced my father when he was 17, my slightly insane cousin who has been working on a 'film project' for the last 10 years, who happens to look exactly like James Spader, and my aunt who is obsessed with Princess Diana's death.

My father was there but I didn't really talk to him, if anything I blanked him and talked to other people. I still haven't quite worked out what I want to say to him yet.

The rest of the day was spent visiting my grandmother in her cottage and then relaxing, the memorial was pretty stressful so afterwards I just wanted to drink sugary tea and lie on the sofa with my cat Spider.

On Sunday I went for a walk around my mother's gardens and the meadows nearby. This was in place of my usual Sunday jaunt to Hyde Park.

One of the fields is now an orchid laced with vole-runs and teaming with wolf-spiders and other insects, but my favourite place was the meadow that was carpeted with buttercups; with the occasional dusting of forget-me-nots and dandelions.

I wondered through it barefoot and then, in the very middle where I was as far away from everything as possible, I had a lie down. Overhead house martins gambled about hunting insects, a bee buzzed past and sipped nectar from a buttercup just by my face. I could hear a complex chorus of birdcalls and the sun washed over me slowly warming me to the bone.

After something like that everything else is put into perspective.